Award
2018 NSF Career Award Winner
Department
Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute/Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics
What is the impact of your research?
With every heartbeat, oxygen from the lungs is pushed throughout the entire body through blood vessels. Blood vessels are therefore essential for maintaining the health of every cell, tissue, and organ in the human body. My research is aimed at gaining more insight into how blood vessels form and function, with the ultimate goal of using that knowledge to improve medical treatments for human diseases where blood vessels are implicated. To gain that insight into blood vessel development and function, we are pushing the frontiers of experimental and computational modeling and integrating these approaches to harness recent technological advances in both domains. Specifically, we hope to leverage next-generation genetic sequencing approaches and super-resolution microscopy with multi-scale computational models to learn more about how these critical conduits for blood flow emerge from and function with coordinated cellular behaviors and molecular interactions.
What do you like most about the field of biomedical engineering and mechanics?
Biomedical engineering positions someone at the crossroads of many different disciplines that converge to solve a medically relevant problem. For instance, projects in my lab draw from materials science and mechanical engineering to explore how our cell types of interest react in certain environments. We apply that insight to develop new experimental models and “engineered tissues” that we are integrating with computational methods to better understand normal blood vessels and those in a pathological setting, such as diabetes.
What path did you take to get to this point in your career and research?
Very early in my academic career, I knew I wanted to help people and society, and therefore I set my sites on going to medical school. In an attempt to be clever and present myself as a “unique medical school applicant,” I studied electrical engineering while filling medical school requirements via a minor in biomedical engineering. During one particularly memorable class, a professor showed us a movie of calcium being added to dynein on microtubules, and as he was illustrating the basis of molecular motors from his research, I sat in awe and knew that biomedical research had captured my imagination.
As an undergraduate, I volunteered in several biomedical engineering labs and found even more inspiration in studying the amazing complexity and hierarchy of the vascular system. Becoming enamored with vascular biology research, I pursued a doctoral degree in biomedical engineering with a project focused on understanding both how new vessels formed and how ultrasound-based techniques might be used to stimulate new vessel growth where needed. In writing my dissertation, I realized that, if we wanted to engineer blood vessel-based solutions to treat certain diseases, we needed to reduce the vascular system to its basic principles to better understand how it worked.
This realization led me to a postdoctoral fellowship in developmental vascular biology. Initially, this switch from biomedical engineering to developmental biology was a bit of a shock, but I soon embraced the curiosity of my “inner scientist” and began enjoying the exploration of how certain properties of blood vessels emerge from cells and molecules. Now, in leading my own lab, I aim to foster that same curiosity in my lab members while focusing our efforts on unraveling the mysteries of the vascular system so that we can connect to clinical problems and help improve lives while pushing the boundaries of discovery.
When you are not researching, what do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
Living in the midst of such natural beauty, I enjoy being outdoors with my family. We hike quite a bit, and have recently discovered some great camping spots. I also enjoy home improvement projects like remodeling our kitchen and am now aiming to update a bathroom in our home. I am also a big sports fan.